Built by the crowd: the changing world of public infrastructure

A test section for a subterranean garden, lit by parabolic dishes and built in a former tram station, under New York's Lower East Side

Cameron R Neilson

A rendering of San Jose terminus on a proposed high-speed rail line in California

Cameron R Neilson

In the spring of 2012, the citizens of Glyncoch in south Wales
had a problem. For years, their rusting community centre -- a
corrugated hulk built in 1977 when the local mine still produced
coal -- had been a shameful eyesore, a grim reminder of how far
their tiny village in the Rhondda Valley had fallen. If they could
build a new one -- with modern IT facilities and classrooms for job
training -- it might help prise their lives from poverty and boost
their civic pride. But the cost, at £793,000, was prohibitive.
Over several years the citizens managed to raise as much as
£750,000 in charity grant pledges, but those pledges were set to
expire in March 2012, if they couldn't raise the remainder on their
own.

Rather than turn to the council, local people turned to the
internet. In March 2012, they pleaded their case on a UK startup,
SpaceHive. Launched that month,
SpaceHive seizes Kickstarter's crowdfunding model and applies it to civic
building projects. Within weeks, Glyncoch's citizens had raised
£43,000. "The money and the old ways of doing things are drying
up," says Chris Gourlay, the 32-year-old founder of SpaceHive. A
former architecture critic at the Sunday Times, he
launched the site after being inspired by the DIY ethos of social
media and crowdfunding models and because he was frustrated by the
opaque procedures of municipal planning boards. The financial
crisis fuelled his belief that infrastructure problems must be
solved not by governments, but by citizen designers and street
activists. "It's a more democratic way to engage in and change the
built world around you," he says. "It's created opportunities for
citizens to solve their own problems with market efficiency."

As budgets shrink, the restricted ability of cities and towns to
build parks, pools and art centres is leading citizens to step in
with new ways to create public spaces and buildings -- using
crowd-based models. In Rotterdam, locals pooled money to build a
pedestrian bridge across a city roadway. In Bogotá, a group of
local citizens will soon own part of a new 66-storey BD Bacata
skyscraper in the centre of town. And in New York City, two
architects are creating and crowd-funding the first ever
underground park, in an old tram station. The trend has spread so
far that a report published in February this year by the American Institute of Architects
argued that members whose fundraising is limited by property
developers could seize crowdfunding to build not what a big
developer wants, but what they and the community think it
needs.

"Creating cities based on the Kickstarter model is a cultural
and business shift," says Rodrigo Davies, a research assistant at
MIT's Center for Civic Media, where he is pursuing his master's on
civic crowdfunding. "But there's a big difference between funding a
folding bike and funding a skyscraper."

It's not just about size. Firstly, Kickstarter
project-supporters can pledge money for a simple consumer product
from anywhere on the planet: a bike, for example, is shippable. But
a skyscraper or bridge is static, meaning that the pool of
potential investors is limited by geography. Cities such as London
and Paris have millions of citizens and tourists who may have an
interest in funding something they might visit or use. Contrast
this with towns and villages that have a smaller base of people,
which means they are able to attract less revenue. Secondly, large
capital projects cost more than bikes and need to be broken into
phases. That can test the patience of donors accustomed to seeing
projects reach goals in weeks, rather than the years it can take
for a civic project to go from plan to realisation.

"The scale and amount of money you need to fund a
capital project is much bigger than funding an iPod
watch"

A case in point. Three young designer friends in New York City
decided that they wanted to build a public swimming pool in an
unlikely, but highly visible, place: the middle of the
pollution-choked East River. The idea was to build a floating pool
and use the river water to fill it via a sophisticated filtration
system. In June 2011, the friends posted a proposal on Kickstarter
-- the first time the site had ever been used for a municipal
project. The designers sought $25,000 (£17,000). Within a week,
their +pool had gained so
much buzz -- thanks in part to a cool animated video -- that they
had pulled in $41,647 (£25,970).

Yet the 1,203 people who pledged money to +pool weren't funding
a pool. They were funding a lab test to see if the filtration
system would work. "The scale and amount of money you need to fund
a capital project is multitudes bigger than what you need to fund
an iPod watch," says Dong-Ping Wong, who, with friends Archie
Coates and Jeffrey Franklin, is designing the $15 million +pool.
"The trick is how do you start breaking down the scale of the
project and funding it in pieces? And then how do you keep people
excited about those pieces, even if it's something boring like a
feasibility study?"

Projects such as this not only raise awareness and money, they
create communities. The +pool has 30,000 followers on social media,
along with 2,000 funders. This is why civic crowdfunding has an
enormous business upside: backers accustomed to social media think
in terms of personalising what they experience. "More citizens
expect, or at the very least desire, to be involved in the
decisions around them," says Bryan Boyer, a 32-year-old
Harvard-trained architect. Last year, he founded an experimental
site called Brickstarter,
with the help of the Finnish innovation fund Sitra, a hybrid think
tank and economic-innovation incubator. Its proto site researched
the civic crowdfunding field and its business implications. One of
the problems in cities, Boyer says, is that "it takes a lot of time
to put together a legitimate proposal, shop around for finance and
get authorities behind it. If we get that money up front, we can
make it plausible."

The California High-Speed Rail project, a $9.9 billion (£6
billion) public-works plan to connect several major cities, from
Sacramento to San Diego, has diverse opponents, from anti-tax
groups worried about cost to environmentalists. Boyer says he can
see a site like Brickstarter offering to bring these people into
one community. "Most people don't have time for meetings," he
says.

An artist's superimposition of the $15 million +pool on the NY's East River, which it would purify and then use for bathing

Cameron R Neilson

An artist's rendering of the 66-storey skyscraper in Bogota, which was crowdfunded from the capital's citizens and its authorities

Cameron R Neilson

The democratisation of design for public structures and spaces
encourages leaps of imagination and innovation that would be
unlikely to occur in a developer's boardroom or the cubicles of a
local planning authority. For 65 years, a century-old tram station
sat abandoned beneath a crowded street on New York's Lower East
Side. The city's transportation agency had never thought to reclaim
it. But James Ramsey, a 28-year-old architect, discovered it and
thought it would make a great public space. So he devised a system
for turning the station into a pioneering underground park: collect
sunlight on the surface with parabolic dishes, channel it through
fibre-optic cables and disperse it below ground, creating enough
photo-synthesis to support acres of trees, shrubs and grass. His
renderings of the site depict a Jules Verne-like ceiling. Beneath
it, families and a sprinkling of hipsters (who tend to support
these schemes) lounge in the weird subterranean light.

Ramsey and his fellow mastermind, former Google marketing
strategist Dan Barasch, dubbed it the Low Line and raised $150,000
(£93,000) on Kickstarter last year, the site's highest amount ever
for a civic project. But Barasch, who deals with the drudgery of
fundraising and winning over politicians and planning boards,
quickly saw the limitations of crowdfunding his $100 million (£62
million) project. "It's great for getting people motivated," he
says. "It creates an inspired community of people that didn't exist
prior to this. But it doesn't work for every phase of
development."

"When you see thousands of people involved, that makes
it very attractive for politicians to get
involved"

Barasch, who says he won't use Kickstarter for his next round of
fundraising, says groups such as his need to expand their
definition of crowdfunding to include "traditional models" --
meaning asking corporations, foundations and philanthropists to
foot the bill.

"Your broadest base of supporters probably doesn't have 20 or 30
bucks to spare, and that's OK," Barasch says. "But they are
seriously engaged and that attracts big money." In other words,
crowd psychology can be as important in executing such projects as
the money itself.

"When you see thousands of people involved," says SpaceHive's
Gourlay, "that makes it very attractive for politicians and for
industry to get involved. These are their customers."

Consider the Luchtsingel pedestrian bridge in Rotterdam. For
generations, a major road sliced through central Rotterdam, cutting
off the city's bustling Hofplein district from easy pedestrian
access. The result was a dangerous crossing. Several young
architects proposed crowdfunding a pedestrian bridge and plaza
where locals could hang out and reclaim the region from cars and
trucks. Their funding method influenced their design: 17,000
U-shaped planks to sell and stamp with the donor's name or message.
Called I Make Rotterdam, the project's slogan is "The more you
donate, the longer the bridge". Donors can buy a single plank for
€25 (£20) or a larger section for €1,250 (£1,068). The project,
begun in 2012, captured the public imagination and became part of
Rotterdam's urban renewal. And because of its crowdfunding success,
the bridge won a €4 million (£3.4 million) municipal grant to
continue. "It's a new reality," says one of its architects,
35-year-old Kristian Koreman. "We have retreating governments and
an ongoing economic crisis. But people are no longer simply going
to wait for things to happen. There is a soft revolution going
on."

But it's a revolution that needs the chequebooks of corporations
and foundations. Jase Wilson, CEO of Neighbor.ly, a US-based
civic-crowdfunding platform, watched the Rotterdam project for
clues. "We think of the crowd as individuals, but it's also
corporations and institutions," Wilson says. "Who's buying hundreds
of these wood planks at a time? It's not individuals. It's
organisations that have an interest in getting their name on
something. That taught us to look beyond the Kickstarter definition
of a crowd, which is person-centric."

Some of the planks -- each sold for £31 -- that make up Rotterdam's footbridge, begun in 2012. Backers dedicate a plank or sponsors leave a message

Cameron R Neilson

The above-ground entrance to New York's subterranean park (rendering)

Cameron R Neilson

Wilson applied this lesson to Neighbor.ly's first project, a
tramline in the platform's home town of Kansas City, Missouri.
Using the Rotterdam model, the site hopes to sell naming or
advertising rights to individual seats, stops, the outside of the
cars and to offer pre-bought ridership rights. The group hopes to
build a sense of ownership and enthusiasm, and that locals and
corporations will find value and civic pride in having their names
on it. Wilson's approach also aims to draw government back into the
mix by raising money to draw US federal matching funds. "We're
looking at Neighbor.ly as a down-payment engine," he says.

But should private citizens have to pay for public
infrastructure? Isn't this the business of central government and
local authorities? "People say, 'Shouldn't our tax money be paying
for this?'" says MIT's Davies, who worked for SpaceHive as a
government liaison before joining MIT. "That's one of the biggest
questions we try to address: 'If citizens start doing this job,
won't governments just pull back?' And we're saying 'No, this money
will not replace it, but sit alongside it.'"

SpaceHive works likes this. Anyone can start a project -- a
citizen, special-interest group, business owner, even a governing
authority. In addition to providing a fundraising portal, the site
offers publicity strategists, legal contracts to ensure the work
gets done, and verification of the project with councils and
landowners. Gourlay and his cofounders target projects that have
already received partial funding from federal or local agencies,
but have been unable to raise the target amount. They then try to
match them with local donors and charitable grant funding. "We
thought when we started that the councils would be threatened, that
there'd be this sense of anarchy from the streets thanks to these
upstarts," says Andrew Teacher, policy director for the site, which
has formed dozens of council partnerships. "They realise the
opportunities here for them, of harnessing this power and
money."

One of the ironies of the financial crisis, says Gourlay, is
that no matter how hard a business owner on the high street might
try to improve their shop or café, the street itself remained run
down and untended due to a lack of infrastructure financing. And
trying to source funding from the local council is a lesson in
bureaucratic frustration. "The system makes it difficult for
ordinary people to invest in pavements and parks, or increase
footfall outside their business," says Gourlay.

SpaceHive overcomes this by directly partnering business owners
and citizens with local councils, charity groups and corporate
donors. For instance, to increase foot traffic in Mansfield in the
east Midlands, SpaceHive raised £36,850 to help the town become the
first in Britain to fund its own Wi-Fi hotspot. Donations came from
the council as well as Experian.

In Somerset it paired activists with the local council and
Experian again, to turn a public toilet into a £10,462 micro art
gallery and food kiosk. "It's been an empowering tool for sourcing
creative and fantastic ideas," Teacher says.

One thing that inspired the SpaceHive team is the knowledge that
a generation of young people who would never consider setting foot
in a planning meeting eagerly take to social media to discuss ways
to improve the built world around them. "There is a growing
awareness that young people do care about where they live and have
great ideas on how to improve it," Teacher says. "Let's say a park
has sat derelict for 15 years and there's no political will to fix
it, meaning there's no resources that will ever be devoted to it,"
says MIT's Rodrigo Davies. "This is a new form of democratic
representation. The voters are speaking to you online. You have to
pay attention: these are your constituents and this is a
referendum."

Since SpaceHive launched last year, a half-dozen similar sites
have sprung up, mostly in the US, including Neighbor.ly, IOBY.com, and Citizinvestor. As odd as
it seems, cities themselves, such as Philadelphia, are launching
their own crowdfunding initiatives. Boyer of Brickstarter and
his colleagues have floated a unique idea: using your own tax
money to fund a project of your choice. "Imagine your own tax given
back to you as currency, or credits, on a site like Brickstarter,
allowing you to decide what gets funded," Boyer says.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Brickstarter, which was
funded in part by money from the Finnish government, is that Boyer
wants someone in the US or UK either to take it over or use its
research to build a moneymaking, community-generating site out of
it. "From the beginning, I didn't care if we built it or someone
else does it," Boyer says. "It was meant as a way to show people
this can be done and how to do it."